Book review

The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720

Jonathan Burton

On the cover of
Gerald MacLean's engaging new study, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 is a 'Portrait
of a European Man' by the Ottoman Artist Abdelcelil Celebi,
known as Levni, and painted c.1720. MacLean does not discuss this
portrait, but its selection as a cover image is calculated and significant.
A strikingly similar image appears on the back book flap, portraying
MacLean in a pose not unlike Levni's anonymous traveller.
Each stands against a backdrop of perfect blue sky, clothed in characteristically
Western garments, and wearing an expression that appears to survey
the scrub-speckled desert landscape which he foregrounds and dominates.
Produced nearly four centuries apart and through distinctly different
technologies of representation, these images juxtaposed on the dust
jacket offer important insights into the critical and narrative
composition of MacLean's book. The author's portrait,
produced through photographic technology, offers sharper lines and
what would seem to be a more trustworthy representation than Levni's
painted portrait of the sky, landscape and traveller. While the
inert facial features of Levni's European man conform to conventions
of Ottoman court painting, the windblown, sunglasses-wearing MacLean
would appear to be more authentic. Whereas Levni's desert
landscape is idealised with blooming flowers, MacLean stands on
a more desolate scene, where unexceptional, pale green scrub pushes
through rocky crevices. In other words, MacLean's portrait
seeks to revisit and demystify Levni's, offering accuracy,
truth, and perspective in place of Levni's romanticised fiction.

Like the author's photograph, The Rise of Oriental
Travel revisits with a critical eye the stories of four journeys
into the Ottoman Mediterranean undertaken by Englishmen in the century
before there was a British Empire. By reading these narratives against
each other, corroborating them with contemporaneous documents, and
drawing on his own experiences of wandering 'deliberately
into and across the footsteps of these four travellers' (p.
xvii), MacLean seeks to highlight a range of early modern attitudes
toward the Ottoman Empire that belie notions of uniform hostility
and/or fearfulness. In other words, like the photograph that replaces
Levni's impressionistic portrait with an aura of crystalline
authenticity, MacLean's re-narration of four English travellers'
tales promises to reproduce their 'narrative rhythms'
while stripping away and exposing the footing of their more fanciful
elaborations. The point of these re-tellings – which MacLean
characterises as biographies of books, more than authors –
is threefold. First, they carefully set each narrative in an intertextual
web to indicate how travellers' accounts are variously inflected
by the rank, profession, and ethnographic literacy of each author.
Second, they seek to 'open and add nuance to the continuing
Orientalism debate' (p. xv) by indicating where earlier visitors
to the East 'both did and did not conform to the attitudes
and prejudices of later Orientalists.'(ibid.) By evidencing
the admiration, envy, and fascination that the early modern English
felt toward Ottoman culture, MacLean's accounts join the research
of Nabil Matar, Daniel Vitkus, Emily Bartels, Ania Loomba and others
in arguing that for the English, 'theological differences
with Islam and the Ottomans were important, but nothing like the
whole story.'(p. xiv) Third, presented as a study of English
encounters with Islamic cultures, these narratives offer insights
into 'the global formations of Englishness' whereas
for each traveller, the experience of travel 'changed what
it meant to be English.'(ibid.)

The four books chosen for retelling suggest a cross-section of
English culture as well as narrative styles. Thomas Dallam's
manuscript journal titled 'A brefe Relation of my Travell
from the Royall Cittie of London towards The Straite of mariemediteranum
and what happened by the waye' (1599), presents the observations
of a 'minimally prejudiced' artisan who repeats hearsay
and writes in predominantly secular terms. The Protestant chaplain
William Biddulph's The Travels of Certaine Englishmen
(London, 1609) is instead a carefully edited epistolary narrative
that seeks challenge previous accounts, but which sees the Ottoman
world through a highly prejudicial lens of biblical knowledge. Where
Biddulph's text hopes to 'set the record straight'
through piety, Sir Henry Blount's A Voyage into the
Levant (London, 1636) proposes a secular, rationalist, Baconian
inquiry into the Islamic world by a wealthy, classically-educated,
gentleman traveller. Finally, The Adventures of (Mr T.S.)
An English Merchant Taken Prisoner by the Turks of Argiers
(London, 1670) offers a proto-novelistic 'concatenation of
facts and fantasies' (p. xiii) that anticipates Orientalist
accounts of Levantine degeneracy, even as it reveals a continuing
admiration for Ottoman imperialism.

After a sequence of brief introductory sections consisting of the
Prologue (a translated Ottoman document, to which I will return),
the Argument, and the Preface (treating methodology), The
Rise of Oriental Travel is divided into four parts, each
apportioned to a single text and subdivided into chapters reflecting
episodes of particular interest within that text. Part 1, 'Dallam's
Organ: By Sea to Istanbul, 1599', turns to the manuscript
journal of Thomas Dallam, narrating the English organ-maker's
journey to Istanbul where he was responsible for assembling and
playing a highly crafted, musical clock of his own construction
and which was to be presented as Queen Elizabeth's accession
gift to Sultan Mehmed III. In Dallam's account, MacLean chooses
one with more literary qualities than most. Dallam's story
is taut, episodic, and even funny, and MacLean's rendering
here is attuned to these qualities even as it contributes a wit
all its own. Previous commentators have tended to focus on the ethnographic
and intercultural aspects of Dallam's journal and MacLean
too indicates how Dallam's account points toward instances
of English deference and where instead it anticipates behaviours
that would flourish in the age of British Empire. Yet what distinguishes
MacLean's re-telling is his attention to the journal's
treatment of relationships between English travellers. We see, as
if with new eyes, how English registers of distinction might be
undermined or re-configured in the Ottoman world. For instance,
MacLean renders apparent the powerful anxieties of Henry Lello,
England's ambassador-to-be in Istanbul, whose career came
to depend on the success of Dallam, a common craftsman. This begins
MacLean's emphasis, revisited throughout the text, on the
tensions between and rivalries among English travellers of different
stations and/or backgrounds. The unstated implication is that the
self-fashioning of English travellers has as much to do with their
representations of other Christians in an exotic and global register
as it does with encounters with Jews and Muslims.

In Part 2, 'Biddulph's Ministry: Travels around Aleppo,
1600–12', MacLean turns to an account often cited by critics
interested in English representations of Levantine life. Yet for
MacLean, what is most interesting is how deeply William Biddulph's
The Travels of Certain Englishmen is shaped by personal
grudges and 'thinly veiled accusations aimed at living Englishmen.'(p.
52) By puzzling together miscellaneous documentary evidence to fill
in the gaps of Biddulph's narrative, MacLean shows how the
Protestant chaplain's alleged efforts to 'set the record
straight' in fact participate in an expatriate culture of
gossip-mongering which would have consequences for the careers of
English authors, ambassadors and clergymen. When Biddulph goes on
to discuss aspects of Ottoman life, these observations too are used
to draw lesson for English reform, whether in regards to marital
practices, national loyalty, or (especially) attitudes toward the
clergy. Although he is said to contribute to the 'Orientalist
pjroject of making the East knowable' (p. 94), MacLean insists
that Biddulph's perspective remains 'resolutely that
of an English Protestant clergyman with little or no interest in
the social, cultural, or political life of those around him.'(p.
101) More important was the task of setting the record straight
in regards to heresy. Thus Biddulph's observations of other
nations 'reinforced prejudices that he had brought with him,
but at the same time they reflect the different degrees to which
he felt foreign customs threatened Protestant belief.'(p.
96) Not surprisingly, Biddulph reserves his most trenchant scorn
for Roman Catholicism, rather than the more alien but lesser known
Christian sects of the Levant. (MacLean's ample endnotes testify
to the author's own knowledge of the diversity and specific
sects conflated or misrepresented by early modern travellers, as
well as continuities with contemporary descendants of the peoples
described.)

In next examining Henry Blount's A Voyage into the
Levant (1636), MacLean chooses a text that suggests for travellers
a program 'involving a complete personal, intellectual, cultural,
and spiritual makeover [that] would have shocked the pious Biddulph.'(p.
130) Whereas Biddulph concerns himself with the increasing danger
of spiritual contagion the further one finds oneself from England,
Blount prefers to avoid his fellow countrymen, don local garb, and
suspend customary expectations. He describes his preparations for
travel as 'putting off the old man', a Baconian rather
than Pauline rebirth involving an abandonment of English predispositions
with the goal of testing tradition and authority. For Blount, Turkey
is the most apt scene in which to 'behold these times in their
greatest glory', and so he casts his narrative as an empirical
study of the roots of Ottoman imperial might. In Blount's
rationalist inquiry, MacLean finds cause to argue that 'Christian
supernaturalism may not have dominated discourse about the East
before the French Enlightenment as Edward Said has suggested.'(p.
123) Nevertheless, he also finds conclusions that anticipate Orientalist
arguments regarding primitivism and degeneration.

In the fourth text under study, The Adventures of (Mr T.S.)
An English Merchant Taken Prisoner by the Turks of Argiers,
MacLean finds a great many more proto-Orientalist tropes. He recounts
with equal parts gusto and curiosity T.S.'s lurid sexual adventures
among Maghrebian women, his encounters with bizarre and unusual
creatures, and his discovery of a 'glorious and all but forgotten
past encrusted within a degenerate living present.'(p. 214)
While this is convincing material for his argument that by the end
of the seventeenth century travel writing contained some of 'the
founding impulses of Orientalism and imperialism', the chapter
is most interesting in its consideration of the proto-novelistic
qualities found in The Adventures. Indeed, MacLean
indicates here that 'the rise of Oriental travel' occurred
in conjunction with the rise of the English novel. Thus while Dallam,
Biddulph and even Baconian Blount may have reproduced myths and
inaccuracies, it is with T.S. that we find the 'murky mix
of fact and fiction' (p. 179), as well as various structural
tropes which would ultimately coalesce as the novel.

MacLean's re-told tales are engaging, thought-provoking,
and witty. Drawn together in The Rise of Oriental Travel,
they gesture toward an anatomy of seventeenth-century English responses
to the Ottoman world. Although MacLean is often more interested
in the ways in which these texts register rivalries among English
or European subjects than in issues of ethnography or transculturation,
he nevertheless provides us with a useful archive for broader inquiries.
Still, in the place of its slender epilogue that testifies to a
dearth of records of English women visitors to the Ottoman Empire
(and which seems more like an appendix), this reader would have
liked to have seen a deeper engagement with the implications of
this material for the historiography of British travel and empire.
Suggestions regarding the relationship between travel writing and
empire might be more fully developed. And it remains unclear why
we should we read these documents in terms of a 'rise of Oriental
travel' when there are ample accounts of earlier eastern travel
from the likes of Margery Kempe, John Mandeville, or any number
of English crusaders (not to mention continental travellers such
as Marco Polo or Johannes Schilteberger)? For that matter, why is
'Oriental' travel limited to English visits to the Ottoman
Empire?

As entertaining and illuminating as they can be, MacLean's
re-tellings are no less selective than the texts they revisit and
amplify. Like the author's dust jacket photo that seems to
sharpen and demystify the cover image, MacLean's renderings
are in fact just as framed and subject to the pose of the renderer.
They focus on narrative frames, ways of seeing, and the experience
of the traveller at the expense of the 'Oriental' landscapes
and peoples described. What we are brought closer to, that is, is
something other than the traveller's experience. While MacLean
never claims to present an absolute reproduction of the traveller's
experience, one implication of his supplementing the four texts
under study with corroborating documents is that a fuller, more
accurate history of English travel will emerge. This would also
seem to be the point of his promise to consider 'the contemporary
historical setting of these visits as seen from the Ottoman side.'(p.
xvii) Unfortunately, this is a promise that goes largely unfulfilled.
The book opens with an absolutely fascinating prologue consisting
of a translated Ottoman account of the reception of Dallam's
fabulous clock and which would seem to promise a contrapuntal analysis.
Rather mysteriously, MacLean chooses not to comment on this document
at all. Likewise Ottoman portraits, including the cover image, are
included among the 36 plates, but these too garner no commentary.
At the same time, MacLean does (of course) discuss at great length
Dallam's account, as well as several of the European images
reproduced in the book. In other words, in the same way that the
author's photograph effectively supplants the Ottoman portrait
of a European traveller on the book's cover, an aggregation
of English voices is made to stand in for what was an intercultural
experience. What remains unclear – particularly where MacLean
focuses on rivalries among the English themselves – is the
extent to which the English experience is inflected by others. In
its decision not to fully integrate Ottoman accounts with their
English counterparts, The Rise of English Travel runs
the risk of presenting a study on Orientalism that reproduces its
unilateral practices of exclusion. Still, by making available to
readers contending Ottoman representations, MacLean provides us
with the means by which we might ourselves provincialise European
histories and particularly the germinating Orientalism of early
modern English travellers.